According to Gallup, the share of white Democrats calling themselves liberal on social issues has grown since 2001 from 39 to 61 percent. Because of this growth, white liberals are now roughly 40 percent of all Democratic voters.

While a substantial percentage of Democratic minorities identify as liberals, those percentages have not been growing at anywhere near the rate that they have for white Democrats, so blacks and Hispanics have not contributed significantly to the rising percentage of self-identified Democratic liberals. Over the past 17 years, for example, the percentage of black Democrats who identify themselves as liberals grew by a modest three percentage points, according to both Gallup and the Pew Research Center.

In fact, white liberals are well to the left of the black electorate on some racial issues.

Take the issue of discrimination as a factor holding back African-American advancement. White liberals are to the left of black Democrats, placing a much stronger emphasis than African-Americans on the role of discrimination and much less emphasis on the importance of individual effort.

That’s fascinating. Educated white liberals — the kind of people who dominate the media and academia — are more woke than the black people for whom they presume to speak and advocate. This is not a parody.

Edsall points out that this is both good and bad news for Democrats. On the up side, it’s driving Democratic mobilization. On the down side, it’s giving Republicans fuel for their claims that the Democrats are a left-wing mob.

Many left-of-center commenters have long blamed conservative voters for being fooled by culture-war issues into voting against their economic interests. (This is the “What’s the matter with Kansas?” idea.) From a right-wing perspective, though, this looks like something admirable: putting moral and spiritual issues above material ones. It only looks like false consciousness to a left-liberal who believes that people only take conservative positions on abortion, marriage, and so forth, because they’re stupid or gullible.

Well, it turns out that those driving the Democrats leftward are doing so for exactly the same reasons:

According to Gallup, the leftward shift among Democrats is more pronounced on social issues involving race, gender and sexual identity than it is on economic matters.

has occurred among non-Hispanic whites. Whereas just 39 percent of white Democrats said they were liberal on social issues back in 2001-2005, that has risen to 61 percent since 2015-2017. By contrast, blacks’ views have hardly changed: 34 percent in the 2001-2005 period vs. 37 percent in 2015-2017.

In addition, according to Gallup, social liberalism grew substantially more among Democratic women than it did among men and more among college-educated Democrats than among those without degrees.

You need to read the story to see the stunning chart that illustrates this finding:

White liberal racial sympathy was, in turn, by far the strongest among the most affluent white liberals.

That is, for white liberals, the richer you are, the more likely you are to regard blacks as pawns of racism — far more than blacks themselves do. And:

According to [a study by political scientist Zach] Goldberg, 2016 marked the first year on record that “white liberals rated ethnic and racial minorities more positively than they did other whites.”

Think about this when you read national white journalists condemning Trump for supposedly dog-whistling to racists in his base. Are the people who say that seeing something that really exists — or are they projecting their own hatred of more downscale whites, who are not like themselves?

become captured in language games that are only understood by the most political and best educated progressive activists, they are likely to alienate a lot of potential supporters — including a large number of women and people of color.

Imagine the perfect political and intellectual weapon. It would disable your adversaries by preoccupying them with their own vanities and squabbles, a bit like a drug so good that users focus on the high and stop everything else they are doing.

Such a weapon exists: It is called political correctness. But it is not a weapon against white men or conservatives, as is frequently alleged; rather, it is a weapon against the American left. To put it simply, the American left has been hacked, and it is now running in a circle of its own choosing, rather than focusing on electoral victories or policy effectiveness. Too many segments of the Democratic Party are self-righteously talking about identity politics, and they are letting other priorities slip.

Of course there is a lot of racism out there, which makes political correctness all the more tempting. Yet polling data suggests that up to 80 percent of Americans are opposed to politically correct thinking in its current manifestations. Latinos and Asian-Americans are among the groups most opposed, and even 61 percent of self-professed liberals do not like political correctness.

Cowen goes on to say that the right has been similarly “hacked” — by Donald Trump:

The president himself is part of the hack, and the core motivation is the desire to “own the libs,” a phrase I didn’t hear much five years ago. We’ve now entered an era in which too many are self-obsessed and too few are effective.

This is anecdotal, so take it for what it’s worth, but since the Kavanaugh-Ford testimony, I have run into more than a few educated whites who tell me that they can’t stand Trump, but the Democrats scared them to death in that process. I spoke to one friend, an Evangelical conservative who has been complaining bitterly about Trump for years, who told me that the Kavanaugh hearings shook him up. He has daughters and sons both, and told me that the contempt that progressives showed for due process frightened him for the world they would bring about for his sons.

Just like that, he went from being a conservative who was alienated from the Republican Party, and willing to vote Democratic to bring his party back to the center, to being someone who believes that the progressive fanatics cannot be allowed to come to power, because they demonize people like him and his sons. He loves Donald Trump not one bit more than he ever did. But he fears the Democrats.

People on the left and the right who want to see economic and foreign policy issues be more important to our politics are going to be sitting on the sidelines for a long time, I’m afraid.

Re: Meanwhile, Medicare alone, and by its own admission, continues to flush $36.2 billion down the drain every year, or approximately $100 million a day:

And yet is lower cost than commercial insurance.
But never mind that: if you think treating sick people is “flushing money down the drain” then I invite you and your family to eschew medical care.: put your life where your mouth is. Unless you think you’re someone “special” and the rest of humanity don’t matter in which case I’m fairly sure Hell has your name on speed dial.

Now it would be easy for the GOP to turn this around, to come at this from the angle of family values and Christian morals. There are liberal women disenchanted with the way liberal men treat them and the failed promises that were handed to them by all the sexual liberation talk. But they won’t come over to the GOP side while women are being treated disrespectfully and called liars there when they break silence for being assaulted.

There might be a sound feminist politics along these lines:

* Civic, political, and professional equality for those women who wish it, along with staunch support for those women who choose stay-at-home motherhood or other “traditional” roles.
* Zealous defense of women against sexual harassment and assault, something which can be grounded in both traditional Christian morality as well as the harm-based ethics of the Left.
* Opposition to the sex industry, to pornography, and to other sexual objectification of women in the media.

In short, the notion that women are people and deserve to be treated with respect, and that any attempt to reduce them to the sexual playthings of men is to be opposed.

Instead, the GOP lately has sounded more and more like the Taliban on the question of women’s rights and role in society. Which is good news for nobody but the Democrats.

You can laugh at The Root all you want. It’s a popular black issues and opinions website.

Which means absolutely nothing as to its veracity. The National Inquirer sells a lot of papers too. I didn’t say its some radical fringe, I said its a small bunch of people spouting personal commentary. I didn’t offer anecdotes… I offered electoral results and empirical observations. If you don’t understand the difference, remind me not to hire you for any job requiring attention to empirical measurements or data.

The basic fact is that Bernie attempted to run a race neutral economic platform and was lambasted for it.

The basic fact is, EVERYBODY who runs for office gets lambasted by SOMEONE. So what? Barack Obama got lambasted for not being “truly black” until people realized that he might actually be elected president, at which point the “He’s black and I’m proud” t-shirts overwhelmed the voices that thought to make a few points for themselves with the “not black enough” criticism.

Bernie suffered for daring the challenge the annointed heir to the Democratic nomination. Who was a damn poor choice, because she made the likes of Donald Trump look credible by comparison.

Actually yes. Once upon a time foreign interventionism was a trait associate with the Left while isolationism was associated with the Right.

No doubt JonF also remembers that the movement to withdraw American troops from Vietnam was led by traditional conservatives.

(That period was one when the difference between “left” and “liberal” became starkly clear, even to people who had never been members of the communist party. Its the period when Phil Ochs wrote “Love Me, I’m a Liberal.”)

The Founders didn’t have a whole lot of experience when they wrote the Constitution. For that matter, nobody in the world had any experience in doing what they did. It is hardly remarkable that they screwed up the hard wired parts

The World According to Harve: A Personal Fantasy of Constitutional Government. Dude, there is a huge difference between “can’t be changed without a constitutional amendment” and “If I were at the constitutional convention, I would have written something about parties.”

The rest of what Harve wrote is an interesting dystopia, but assumes facts not in evidence. Par for the course for someone who wants to style themselves “left” while writing off the working class as irrelevant.

“An Hogan is cruising to reelection in what is otherwise a Democratic wave year, suggesting a way forward for the GOP if it can ever recover from both Trump’s march of folly and Paul Ryan’s “f*** the non-rich” agenda.”

I was referencing presidential and legislative races. It’s true that blue states will sometimes elect moderate Republican governors – Mass, NJ, and CA. and we have Kasich in Ohio (conservative and terrible in that sense but not crazy or evil).

The case is that they are usually niche actors who often slip through due to Democratic timidity and stupidity. Not familiar with Maryland but running Coakley in Mass. after the Senate race was gross political malpractice. NJ has repented of Christie. In CA, Schwarzenegger was the result of the legislature falling for a Republican trap on DMV fees and Davis wimping out during the power crisis.
He (Arnold) was not a good governor.

(Ca deregulated electric power under Republican Pete Wilson in 1996. The law took effect in 1998. By 2000 electric rates were spiking. Enron was manipulating generation to game prices. Davis dithered when he should have seized the plants.)

The problem you have is that the typical Republican couldn’t get elected in a blue state and a Republican who could get elected in a blue state couldn’t win a primary in a red state. The conservative purge of RINOs is irreversible.

JonF says:

“Re: You mean when the Democratic Party was prosecuting the Vietnam War, that far left?”

“Actually yes. Once upon a time foreign interventionism was a trait associate with the Left while isolationism was associated with the Right.”

Not exactly. You might want to ponder just what you mean by “Right” (conservatism as a self-conscious revolutionary movement didn’t exist until well into the 20th century) and “Far Left” (Johnson was a New Deal Liberal who had to get elected in a southern state and Humphrey was a New Deal Liberal from a northern state with a progressive tradition and was responsibe for the 1948 platform statement on civil rights that led to the Dixiecrat walkout) and review the list of U.S. foreign interventions over the past century and a half.

You are extrapolating from the America First movement prior to Pearl Harbor. The right opposed fighting fascism (big surprise!) as did CPUSA until Hitler invaded the Soviet Union (again, big surprise!).

Historically the right has always supported suppression of the left with force be it in Homestead and Ludlow or Arkhangelsk and Vladivostok not to mention Iran and Central America (how did that work out?).

Besides the decades long fear-mongering over socialism, communism, and unionization, one has to factor in the successful Chinese Revolution and later the Cuban Revolution when discussing Vietnam.

“Who lost China” was a very real thing back in the day. Anti-communism was theologized by folks like Billy Graham and ideologized by an emergent Movement Conservatism. There was a real hysteria, akin to the Islamic terrorist thing after 911 and immigration today but taken to nth power.

Instead of taking the Long Telegram to heart, most conservatives and way too many liberals viewed Communism qua Communism as the universal problem instead of separating legitimate local aspirations from Russian/Soviet imperialism.

Vietnam was a liberal screw up supported by the right; Iraq was a conservative screw up supported (at first) by a lot of liberals. Vietnam did lead to Nixon and that seems to have been the beginning of the end.

(N.B. We really shouldn’t forget the role Nixon’s treason played in sabotaging the peace talks. The first but not the last time a Republican candidate was willing to go there.)

I have met lots of non-whites who were/are quite conservative on a wide host of issues. They don’t vote Republican because they view, not entirely incorrectly, that the GOP gives a seat at the table to racists and bigots. Trump and his supporters (people like Kanye West notwithstanding) are seen by many non-whites as an existential threat. And they find the ‘Democrat plantation’ talk of many pro-Republican black public figures to be deeply insulting.

@JonF

Except during the Populist Party era, which saw cross-racial working class coalitions take power in places like North Carolina until the planter elites destroyed them and institutioned Jim Crow, African-Americans have tended to be very wary of popular radical politics. Mostly because ‘populism’ often has equaled dis-possession and exclusion of non-whites in American history.

I have always found the conservative obsession with the Clintons bizarre, as both policy-wise have very conservative records for post re-alignment Democrats.

If the voting totals in the last 3 ‘personhood’ amendment votes in CO, MS, and ND are to be believed, quite a few social conservatives at the grassroots level don’t believe their own rhetoric on life issues, much less whether the GOP elites do or do not believe in the pro-life plank of the GOP platform.

That’s your justification for WASTING $100 million of taxpayer dollars per day?

I’d love for you to give me one single, solitary example from the private sector of waste on that level.

But no, sir, you can try, but you’ll never take away quality private sector health care plans and turn them into another federal entitlement disaster with no accountability. And yes, Medicare for all is a scheme to do just that.

That fight will be won by the over 100 million private sector workers who vote and who won’t permit you to take away their earned health care benefits.

Private vs. public is about 50/50. Last time I checked, the private sector profit margin in health care was around 3% annually. That’s considered “waste” by you good progressives. Well, Medicare is the single largest public sector health care expenditure, and by it’s own admission, that program alone wastes rate about 10% per year.

And you say that the private sector is still tangibly worse? I’m not even going to wait for you to qualify that, because you obviously didn’t put much thought into it.

Here’s a tip: Don’t ever believe your own BS. It hurts your credibility, not that you had much…

“I have always found the conservative obsession with the Clintons bizarre, as both policy-wise have very conservative records for post re-alignment Democrats.”

Look at some of the horrendous and nasty things you have said about Republicans sometime. Many of your nastiest accusations about the moral corruptness of the right look incredibly hypocritical given the passionate support many Democrats gave the and continue to give the Clintons.

Re: That betrayal is about to cost him and the GOP the congressional lock.

I don’t think immigration has much to do with it. The Congreessional GOP has been hugely unpopular for a good many years and if the blue wave does roll ashore in two weeks it might be less a comment on Trump than on Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan. As I have said before having a Democratic congress to use as a foil– and maybe even make a popular deal or two with– could ensure Trump’s reelection.

@MM”You can’t call Trump a Nazi and a Russian agent, at the same time, and still make sense,”

Au contraire! Leaving aside the issue of whether or not he is a “Russian agent” (which is hyperbole), the analogy makes perfect sense given who is in charge in Mother Russia at the present time. On the TV babble shows I hear lots of folks (neo-cons, progs etc) who should know better drawing comparisons between Vlad The Impaler Jr. and his regime to the Shicklgruber crowd that ran Germany in the 30s and 40s. (Actually, a comparison to the ancien regime of the tsars would be more accurate but no one is into accuracy anymore).

If you are going to provide a link about studies, you should read the article. It states

“The Yale study, which goes as far back as 1990, found the same upward and downward trajectory as the ACS studies, with the undocumented population ballooning through the 1990s and plateauing after 2007.
The researchers emphasized the new number does not imply a growth in illegal immigration but a longstanding miscount of existing undocumented immigrants.
“We wouldn’t want people to walk away from this research thinking that suddenly there’s a large influx happening now,” said Feinstein. “It’s really something that happened in the past and maybe was not properly counted or documented.”

So, to be clear, our illegal immigrant population peaked in 2007. We are NOT being overrun. Face facts, bro.

And yet is lower cost than commercial insurance.
But never mind that: if you think treating sick people is “flushing money down the drain” then I invite you and your family to eschew medical care.: put your life where your mouth is. Unless you think you’re someone “special” and the rest of humanity don’t matter in which case I’m fairly sure Hell has your name on speed dial.

MM appears to be speaking of Medicare fraud (specifically fraudlent billing from doctors, including fake medical practices who only exist to bilk Medicare, and who don’t ever actually see any real patients), which is a widespread problem. However, the solution to that problem isn’t to end Medicare. Fraud against private insurance companies is a problem too, and nobody offers that as a reason to get rid of private insurance.

That betrayal is about to cost him and the GOP the congressional lock. And if by 2020 Trump has still failed to seal the borders and deport the illegals then he’s outta here too.

Sounds good to me! And here I was despairing that it’s only the malcontents on the left who have the bad habit of sitting out elections (and letting the opposition party back into power) when they don’t get their pony.

I have met lots of non-whites who were/are quite conservative on a wide host of issues. They don’t vote Republican because they view, not entirely incorrectly, that the GOP gives a seat at the table to racists and bigots.

I second that. I have heard from the pulpit of the same churches, strident statements that Donald Trump is a racist, and complaints that someone’s child at summer camp was called a ‘phobe for saying something that upheld traditional marriage. I have a good friend who was always a law-and-order guy, wanted thugs to walk barefoot on broken glass or hot coals, who was genuinely distressed that so many “white” people could vote for Trump, considering this acceptance of racism. I don’t entirely agree, but its an opinion sincerely held.

MM, first off your original comment did not specify that you were discussing alleged “waste” in Medicare. Please do not blame me for your failure to explain what you are talking about in unambiguous words. Secondly you need to to document, FROM REPUTABLE SOURCES, that said waste is anywhere near number you quote, which sounds like something pulled from some ranting glibertarian screed and is likely orders of magnitude too great.
Finally the fact that there there is waste in something is accidental not essential and is no reason to oppose that something (though it is reason to call for better efficiency where possible). Every machine we humans have invented, indeed every natural process too, wastes energy (2nd Law of Thermodynamics) yet we continue to use such things, ditto nature and it’s less than perfect processes, making them better where we can but accepting that perfection is not possible.

MM, I do not consider profit insurance to be “waste” I consider it be evil, as Franklin Evan’s has also stated. Profit is natural to value-added activities; but insurance is simply about moving money around, and it should never be allowed to generate a profit.
And you are dead wrong if you think there is never any fraud perpetrated on Aetna, United Health etc. or by them for that matter.

Umm, okay. What do I personally have to do with you voting for a degenerate scoundrel like Donald Trump? So liberals (many of who are irrelevant and have no actual political power) being mean to you makes you go full MAGA? Sounds like you didn’t need much of a push.

‘Vote for scoundrels and cretins to own the libs’ is really not a very good argument.

Right-wingers need to let go of their commitment to a politics of ideological grievance-mongering, and actually rebuild institutions that can last.

JaneDoe said “So, to be clear, our illegal immigrant population peaked in 2007. We are NOT being overrun. Face facts, bro.”

22 million illegals running around loose. Right now, not back in 2007. They broke into and took up position inside our country. They’re still here. They never left. It’s the veritable definition of being “overrun”.

So yeah, face facts: until we start the major deportation campaign that Trump promised but didn’t deliver, we’ll continue to be overrun.

A national government’s main job is to secure the borders, and by that measure Trump and the last few presidents at least have failed. Trump has failed even by Obama standards. And in his case the failure is fatal, because it was and remains THE issue.

What do I personally have to do with you voting for a degenerate scoundrel like Donald Trump?

Hound… did YOU vote for Hillary Clinton? Speaking from the left, as someone who voted for Sanders even though he’s kind of milquetoast as a socialist, and held my nose to vote for Clinton because I expected Trump to perform about as he has… I blame all the liberals who boosted Clinton for making some of my fellow voters willing to hold their nose and vote for Trump. Don’t know if that includes you or not.

insurance is simply about moving money around, and it should never be allowed to generate a profit.

Almost true. but with a few caveats. One is, when an insurance fund starts out, or ventures into new territory, there is a calculated risk that a cluster of high payment events will occur before all the reserves are fully collected from premiums only beginning to be paid. The original shareholders sometimes are people who put up their own money to jump start the reserves, and its not unreasonable that a modest return be paid to them for the use of their money.

Of course the actual practice of established insurance companies goes way beyond this, but we need to be very specific as to what we are talking about.

Second, investing reserves to boost over-all cash flow is not a bad idea per se. It should, however, reduce premiums at least as much as it rewards shareholders.

And, there is the hazard of the Chinese story about a community pooling its money to construct a standby diversion channel for flood waters. Most years it wasn’t needed, so the board overseeing the channel planted crops in the dry channel, making a tidy sum. When a flood did come, the board concluded that their crop would be very valuable with so much acreage being overwhelmed by flood waters and food being scarce, so it would be a shame to open the sluice gates and destroy the valuable crop. That perversion of insurance can also be a real hazard.

JonF: “Secondly you need to to document, FROM REPUTABLE SOURCES, that said waste is anywhere near number you quote, which sounds like something pulled from some ranting glibertarian screed and is likely orders of magnitude too great.”

Uh, pal, are you having problems reading these days?

I cited CMS.gov above regarding Medicare waste. The $ amounts are spot on, and it’s a minimum estimate, by the government itself. It doesn’t even include fraud, which would only push that number higher.

I’ve not argued that Medicare should end, just end as we know it, an entitlement with no cost control and no means-testing. And I’ve not argued that private health care if waste and fraud free, but you’ve failed to provide a single $ example anywhere to compare with Medicare.

And you’re silent on the Yale immigration study, which you couldn’t be bothered to even look up on your own. Evidently, you can lead a partisan to knowledge, but you can’t make him think.

Look, why don’t we make a gentleman’s agreement:

You stop making claims unsupported by the facts, and I’ll stop citing the facts, because you clearly can’t be bothered to even look at them.

MN, again, if you bother to explain yourself in calm and reasonable terms you’ll find me replying in kind, whether I agree with you or not. Your original comment referred to “flushing money down the toilet” without any of the background you provide above, making you sound like some sort of Randite Docial Darwinist who does not think non-rich people deserve healthcare beyond what they can personally pay for.

MM, the 2017 Medicare Fee-for-Service Supplemental Improper Payment Data document that you linked to in your October 21, 2018 at 12:26 pm reply to JonF includes a pie chart that says that 9.5% of Medicare Fee-for-Service spending was spent on improper payments, but it doesn’t address waste in the 300 million or so dollars spent on the rest of Medicare. Do you have any idea whether the waste in the rest of Medicare’s spending is at a comparable rate or is lower or higher, or any sources for that data?

Unfortunately, your argument regarding public vs. private waste in health care insurance suffers from a decided lack of data on the private side, resulting in serious apples vs. oranges problems. The only comparison you make between the Medicare FFS improper payment data you cited and “waste” in the private health care insurance industry is to the 3% annual “private sector profit margin in health care,” but you don’t provide a citation for that (the chart upi linked to merely supports your statement about the 50/50 split in private vs. public spending on health care in the US) and it’s unclear whether said “health care” profit rate is limited to just the private sector health insurance industry or includes actual, hands-on health care providers, for-profit and/or non-profit, which goes well beyond the insurance or payment services provided by Medicare. But to really get down to brass tacks, you’d need to provide a comparison between improper payments made by Medicare’s FFS program and improper payments made by similar fee-for-service programs insured by the private sector health insurance industry, and you have not done so. I would be happy to review such data if you can provide a link to it.

JonF: ” Your original comment referred to “flushing money down the toilet” without any of the background you provide above,”

I can’t believe this, how dense are you sir?

That comment of mine, right at the top of this page, which ends with a colon (:) and is immediately followed by a link to CMS.gov, is apparently too difficult for you to interpret or too time-consuming for you to bother to read.

You demand, let me quote, “reputable sources” or you will not accept facts or conclusions other people are making, and then you don’t even take the time to read the source, which by the way is the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees Medicare and Medicaid.

I’ll repeat that: You demand facts to your liking, and then don’t even bother to examine them when they’re given.

Don’t let anybody ever accuse you of having an open-mind, pal. I don’t come across statists like that evidence their bias in such stark black and white, but when I see them, there they be!

Here’s some more information you’ll no doubt ignore, but it bears relevance. And for the record, whenever the federal government spends money on things its own departmental officials say it shouldn’t have, so-called “improper payments”, as a taxpayer, I consider that WASTE with a capital “W”:

In 2017, between Medicare and Medicaid, $90 billion was wasted. That’s almost $250 million per day. And again, this is HHS which overseas both of those programs admitting to that monstrous amount of government waste. You call private sector health care “evil”, but this is on an order of magnitude far greater, but you apparently have absolutely no problem with it. Because it’s the government, and it has to be good, huh?

By comparison, that level of waste, in a single year, it’s been going on for awhile, is the equivalent of a small war overseas. The Defense Department’s overseas operations cost around $60 billion.

And it’s larger than the entire annual budget of any of the following federal departments: Commerce, Energy, Homeland Security, HUD, Interior, Justice, State, and Transportation.

By not even addressing the issue, that’s what you’re defending. And “Medicare For All” means making it all even worse.

When someone offers a detailed factual analysis of MM’s proffered data, and comes to a different conclusion, MM responds with accusations of not having done any homework. Sad. Its the same mechanism the average street corner hustler uses when caught red-handed, screaming loud inanities that nobody can understand until everyone else gives up and goes home.

As an aside, nobody made excuses for segregationist Democrats, we were merely debating how much of the Dixiecrat wing of the party moved how fast into the Republican Party.

Jenkins: “When someone offers a detailed factual analysis of MM’s proffered data, and comes to a different conclusion, MM responds with accusations of not having done any homework.”

No, sir. I’m not obligated to provide evidence for a position that I’m not arguing, namely that private sector health insurance companies don’t waste any portion of premiums they collect. I’ve never argued that point, and I’m not going to respond to demands that I research that information.

My only point, which remains unchallgned, is the sheer level, in the tens of $ billions, of federal government waste, just in health care. I believe total improper payments amount to $150 billion per year, almost 1% of real GDP. The Pentagon is another horror show, and they won’t even consent to an audit.

“Sad.”

Wait for it…

“Nobody made excuses for segregationist Democrats, we were merely debating how much of the Dixiecrat wing of the party moved how fast into the Republican Party.”

Oh, the irony. When I provided relevant data on that topic, namely the 90+ Democrats whi signed the Southern Manifesto who never switched parties, directly contradicting your argument, you both changed your argument, and didn’t even bother to provide any facts to support that obfuscation. In my book, that’s the definition of excuse-making, and in your case, it was on behalf of segregationist Democrats.

“In the United States, which has a greater percentage of fraud committed Medicare/Medicaid or private insurance?”

I was DuckDuckGo’ing a bit and found website after website with government reports on Medicare and Medicaid fraud, news reports of such fraud, and conservative commentators discussing such fraud, but no one could seem to come up with an answer as to how much fraud takles place in the private health insurance system. I did, however, find a rather clever and telling answer to the question above at Quora.com:

Karen Tiede (old lady in training who lives in a rural area with 6 dogs.) Answered Dec 19 2013

“I would start by suspecting the relative percentage is exactly proportional to the relative percentage of health care delivered under ‘all insurance’ vs. ‘all government-paid health care.’ I WOULD THEN EXPECT THAT THE PRIVATE INSURANCE COMPANIES WOULD GO TO SOME LENGTH TO KEEP THEIR LOSSES PRIVATE SO THAT WE DON’T REALIZE HOW EAST IT IS TO STEAL FROM THEM. THE GOVERNMENT HAS A DIFFERENT INCENTIVE TO MAKING THEIR CASES PUBLIC.” [emphasis added]

MM can provide evidence of fraud and abuse in Medicare and Medicaid because the government has to provide that information; it is, after all, the public purse. I am finding it hard to provide evidence of fraud and abuse in the private health insurance industry because it is not the “official” public purse and because it is not in the interest of that private, profit-driven industry to provide that information. But, and here’s the old story with MM, that didn’t stop MM from trying to pull a fast one. MM doesn’t have the information for private health insurance fraud, but couldn’t resist making a show of being even-handed, so MM presents the “health care” sector’s profit rate – Without answering my question as to exactly what part of the health care sector that profit rate applies to, I notice, so are we comparing government insurance programs to private insurance companies or to hospitals and clinics and nursing homes? – as the “progressive” idea of private sector “fraud.” As I said, apples and oranges. As Siarlys said, misdirection.

One of the other answers at Quora.com included a long explanation of fraud in Medicare and Medicaid that including the following quote: “Economist Benjamin Zycher has estimated that a full accounting for these administrative expenses would double Medicare’s administrative cost ratio to 6 percent.” So, WITH fraud included, Medicare’s administrative costs would still be one-half to one-third of the administrative cost of the private health care industry (https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/sep/20/bernie-s/comparing-administrative-costs-private-insurance-a/), NOT including the cost of fraud in the private sector because those expenses are, seemingly, not acknowledged, or at least not documented, or if they are documented, they are a lot harder to find than the numbers for government fraud. If I had to guess, the insurance companies have estimates of the amount of fraud in their system, but are protecting those estimates the way the tobacco companies protected their internal reports on the link between tobacco and cancer, or the oil companies protected their internal documentation on the risks to the planet of carbon emissions.

So, against MM’s “only point” about the sheer level of fraud in government health insurance, I guess my only point would be that the administration of said government health insurance is still more efficient, fraud included, than private health insurance, and that’s without even being able to find the numbers on fraud in the private sector.